It's a highly popular mod on armed assault 2 combined ops, to the point that arma2 has peeked a couple of times to top1 most played games on steam ( which was never the case before, because arma 2 is a hardcore warsim ), most gamers buy the game just for the mod.
The game mod is a combination between zombie apocalypse, stalker/fallout and hungergames ( battleroyale ) on a 250km^2 island based on the real thing. There 100+ servers with 50 player slots and there is one master server that saves your location/gear/health and extras such as vehicles so you can join freely on another server to continue your game.

The mod though in alpha is the best thing if you like the whole walking dead type of experience, but it's brutal and unforgiving. Not to mention that to even run this you will need a medium to high end pc. The game is enjoyed in single player experience but also when you band together with a group of friends.

The first time you play your character will start on a island on the coast ( south or eastern in this czech/ post-soviet based setting )
And you will die within 10 minutes. ( That's the actual average life span of a character in DayZ ). So don't worry a lot of knowledge, skill or experience is required to make a character able to survive longer. But the longer you survive the bigger the fear becomes that he might eventually find his demise as permadeath is just one mistake away. 15 days is my record.

Game summup:
- You start with just a handgun and ammo to survive a few zombie attacks, food and drinks for an hour and a small backpack for extra items. You don't have a compass, map, cutting knife, watch, lighter....tools you need to survive.

- Items can be found in any town, police/fire station, army camp, barn ...basicly anything with a roof over it spawns random stuff. Unfortuantly the buildings that can be entered even in a town are scarse ( fallout level ). So you really must get a eye for which building type has biggest chance of being open.

- Your constantly forced to keep moving and scavenge but the risks will be bigger and bigger, but unlike fallout vegas hardcore mode it will never get tedious. In fact the longer you survive the more you have to lose. Greater awards can be founds in malls in large towns, airfields, military bases, but risks are greater 2.

- You can logout after your character is saved but if you logon later the character will be hungy and thirsty while not playing. He wont die or die just after login back in but logging out without having spare food and drink will make the game harder on the login. It might sound nasty but it all works towards the necessity to survive feeling.

- Zombies can be shot but noise attracts more, the bigger and better your gun the more sound it will make.
You will need to learn to sneak past zombies, of course with risk of getting spotted while in to deep behind enemy lines.
Crouching is best to sneak but there are zombies that prefer to lie down ( most likely of missing limbs ) and the grass grows pretty high in arma 2. Zombie numbers depend on location a barn filled with food and maybe chance of finding old winchester will have around 7 zombies at most, making a mishap in a town will most likely be your last mistake as 200 zombies will rush you from all sides ( a good moment to shoot your fellow survivor in the leg and make a run for it walking dead style ). In a open field 3 zombies can easily kill you...so guess what 200 zombies can do.

- You are not alone on the server there are survivors. You can communicate with them using in game speech ( with arma 2's lipsync function, so the character is actually speaking your words ) or type text in chat. A survivor is just another player, he can be friendly, scared for his life, out to kill you for your can of beans, your beautifull rifle or just for fun. Players that kill other players to often become known as bandits. Bandits also have a different character skin and killing them doesn't turn you into one. Making friends in early characters life is the best idea and avoid em completely later unless you can share a ts channel with em. Always avoid groups even the friendliest players turn into merciless monsters in groups towards outsiders.

- You can find tents and vehicles that will be saved with you. Tents are placed where you can store items and join another server without losing that extra portion of items, it's basicly your diablo chest :). Vehicles makes traveling and meeting up with people easier, your even capable to find choppers. But these vehicles are very rare, hard to repair and maybe even harder to maintain and make a hell of a noice.

- Damage is really dynamic. A grenade can knock you out and leave damage to your hearing, falling of a ladder and you can injure your tendon or snap your bones. 2 much damage and you can start bleeding or your heart rate can suffer. You got bandages, pain killers etc to keep yourself and your friends alive. If you lose to much blood you vision gets blurry, darker and your view distance narrows in or you might even faint. This will not go away on it's own..time to risk your life and/or your friend in patching you back up with the necessary item scavenging.

- You will need to learn real map learning skills. I once played with a guy who played battlefield 2 project reality and had a car so he could read road maps. ArmA 2 is bit harder than that and roadmap reading is not the same as pinpointing your position between 2 forest lines in the middle of nowhere :D. Your going to need to develop experience with this.

All in all the game really pulls you in. Unfortuatly the game does not come without problems in it's alpha stage, so the goal is limited to surviving in a sandbox zombie game.
ArmA 2 the main engine is not bug free either, your standing in shallow water to refuel you waterbottle and all of sudden your gear gets wet and useless ( even when not submerged ), you fall of a ladder because of an animation bug that can occur if your holding a pistol while climbing, GUI exspecially surrounding picking up slots and dragging stuff from you inv. to your bagback is all pretty difficult and can end up throwing away items if you doing it wrong without you realising.

All in all the best zombie survival experience. Here some vids please know that the level of seriousness of playing this results in the level of survivability :D

At 5/20/12 09:41 AM, Jackho wrote:
Sounds damn good. Can you play with the free version of Arma II?

Unfortunately no. There are tricks to get to play though for less money. ArmA 2 combined ops is basicly ArmA 2 + ArmA2 OA.
So you could only buy OA on steam for 15 euro and put the addons from ArmA 2 free in the addon folder of ArmA2 OA.
But then you got a game that uses the low textures from ArmA 2 free and good ones from OA. That is gonna look weird exspecially since combined ops is 25 euros ( 10 euros more ).

You could wait though since summer deals on steam are not far away. And the game mode though awesome is still in child shoes.

At 5/20/12 09:48 AM, Tramps wrote:
I actually bought/downloaded this on Friday. I was trying to go on it yesterday but had a bunch of problems with servers not appearing at all on the list and when I was finally able to see the servers, when I tried to join one, it got stuck for at least 30 minutes without doing anything. It must be from the bump in popularity and I'm hoping it'll smooth over soon.

Hopefully it'll be working soon, but until then I have plenty of other games to play.

Once all the servers go down for update or maintenance, it takes pretty long before they show up since a couple guys need to manually install the updates on each server ( since all servers are individual arma 2 send as a gift to DayZ devs. When they show up again everyone frantically joins up the game at the same time this puts tremendous loads on the master server resulting in massive loading time, which is already long for a new player.

Still for an alpha it's amazing game experience and I hope they work out a deal later with bohemia interactive to make a standalone game. Because now the engine is build for land/sea and air warfare with countless of vehicles should they adapt the basic engine to zombie experience and you basicly get the best experience you can get from a zombie game.

The fear I have in this game with the creepy atmosphere and chance of dying is really unique. If your character is alive over 14 days you really start to distrust everyone zombie and survivor alike and when you actually die the first thing you feel is relief that the nightmare is over. Of course after 2 minutes of sinking in the ragequit comes. :D

Too bad my computer can't download/install Steam for some odd reason. Not even like my computer sucks or anything, Steam just crashes each time during installation.

Any of you guys know what the problem may be?

Don't know seems issue more fitting for steam forum. On other hand I bought my combined operations on a website for similar price. Sometimes steam patches the game before the server admin does and you end up your gaming having the latest patch while all the servers are unreachable anyway.

At 5/20/12 10:52 AM, Migel wrote:
Unfortunately no. There are tricks to get to play though for less money. ArmA 2 combined ops is basicly ArmA 2 + ArmA2 OA.

Sorry for the double post but you can use ArmA 2 Free version, but you need to have Operation Arrowhead as well. But you're probably better off buying combined operations anyways for bug and texture purposes.

At 5/20/12 12:41 PM, SineRider wrote:
Sorry man I beat you to it a week ago ;)

Cool to see more people playing it though. My in game name is Siney btw

Ah I did a search nothing showed. Nice stuff though my nickname is either MiGeL or Calm.
Though with all the servers gonna be hard to find each other, just played night time today for the first kind of make me wish I didn't throw away all flares: d

Man, I was watching a playthrough of this earlier and just by watching it I can tell that it's good.

I mean the environment is so eerie, if you're just alone on your own it'd make you feel paranoid. You also have to rely on your survival instincts since you'll have to raid a few barns to get some ammo/food but there's a chance that it's infested with zombies or another player is camping there in which case you're fucked. Hopefully they add this to the official game and have it as an additional mode with patches and bug fixes. That'll be sick.

At 5/20/12 12:41 PM, SineRider wrote:
Sorry man I beat you to it a week ago ;)

Cool to see more people playing it though. My in game name is Siney btw

Ah I did a search nothing showed. Nice stuff though my nickname is either MiGeL or Calm.
Though with all the servers gonna be hard to find each other, just played night time today for the first kind of make me wish I didn't throw away all flares: d

Tell me about it, I've been trying to meet up with Rig for the last hour, but no luck getting into the same server and staying there long enough to meet up.

At 5/20/12 09:41 AM, Jackho wrote:
Sounds damn good. Can you play with the free version of Arma II?

Unfortunately no.

Damn. I think my brother may have Arma II though, I'll use his copy and pick up OA when it's cheap. Can't wait.

One more thing though, does it matter if you mix & match different versions of the game? As in if I have the retail version of Arma II but the steam version of Operation Arrowhead will it still work fine?

At 5/20/12 08:03 PM, Jackho wrote:
Damn. I think my brother may have Arma II though, I'll use his copy and pick up OA when it's cheap. Can't wait.

One more thing though, does it matter if you mix & match different versions of the game? As in if I have the retail version of Arma II but the steam version of Operation Arrowhead will it still work fine?

I said it earlier, but you can use ArmA 2 free. As for mixing and matching, I have no idea, but seems like a bad idea.

So me and Rig had a pretty crazy night playing this. It was a ton of fun but ended up pretty badly, with both of us dying in a really lame way.

We met up and trekked through a town and found a pick-up truck with a small amount of gas. We eventually stopped at a town to get supplies and possibly more gas, and found a lone survivor fighting off zombies in a supermarket. We helped out and went out separate ways. Later we got stuck in a barn and my ammo was low (looking back I realized i had a few slugs in my backpack, always check there). Rig ended up getting knocked out and I tried to save up but ultimately misfired and killed him :c

So i was by myself and drove the truck around a bit more, stopped in Stary Sobor after two guys flagged me down. Shit hit the fan here, we were all using enfields (super loud gun that attracts zombies) and held our own in a warehouse for about 15 minutes. The zombies never stopped coming and we must have taken out 200 or so. We decided to make a run for it and I lost the two guys. Went back to my truck and it was completely clear. I waited a few, but it seemed the two guys either died or logged off. So I drove on and got supplies in the next town.

Rig had respawned and was over in town close by and found a new four seat car to fix it. Drove there and we finally found a tire for it in town. Gleefully we drove off and somehow glitched/crashed into debris killing both of us instantly.

I never found a vehicle yet, one time I did see a helicopter fly over that gave me awesome feeling as I was slaughtering a goat. Maybe it's because I usually circle around the west side of the island between Kamenka and north airfield, Zelenogorsk is my favourite town. But personally I don't mind walking, with my driving skills probably die at the first rubble on road, would love a helicopter though.
Love the dark server settings as well managed to kill 3 bandits yesterday because they turned on the light with their flares as I sat 800 meters away in the woods :D.

At 5/21/12 12:44 PM, Tramps wrote:
So, I keep getting this everytime I go on the game and onto Multiplayer. It freezes for like 10 seconds and then this screen comes up. Changing the filter or refreshing doesn't do anything - I just can't see any servers. Anyone have any idea? I've allowed it through the firewall and port forwarded and even tried disabling Avast while it runs but nothing seems to help.

Sounds like connection problem with gamespy itself.
If I were you I would register with BIS forums and ask for help there, the only solution I have is that your host file is maybe not clean. This files is located in system32\drivers\etc and when opened should only show the line "127.0.0.1 localhost" if more lines show up and you have not placed em there then a trojan has licked it.

A quick bypass while you wait for solution is to googling : "arma 2 server stats" pick a dayz server, copy the adress, tab back into multiplayer screen, click remote and paste the ip there. Now only that server shows up but at least you can join it as you wait for fix.

I got the gold pack collection as I didnt want to get the game and find out I would like to play the expansions and then having to may an extra Â£5 per expansion.

Certaintly more tactical, im getting shot from all over the fucking place yet I still cant see the enemy. But usually when I do see them I can easily kill them so its more about cover, advancing, flanking and timing rather than a test on who shoots who first with the better weapon.

But fuck me, enough keybindings?! I have now had to resort to the WASD keys than the usual arrow keys as trying to alter just one key ends up making you alter them all.

At 5/21/12 05:05 PM, MrPercie wrote:
Certaintly more tactical, im getting shot from all over the fucking place yet I still cant see the enemy. But usually when I do see them I can easily kill them so its more about cover, advancing, flanking and timing rather than a test on who shoots who first with the better weapon.

But fuck me, enough keybindings?! I have now had to resort to the WASD keys than the usual arrow keys as trying to alter just one key ends up making you alter them all.

It's definitely easy to get the upper hand on an opponent in certain situations, even if they outgun you. But really WASD is so much better for FPS, especially a game like this where you need to hit different keys nearby, quickly

@tramps
First off let me say that hosts.msn in 70% of the time is result after installing illegal software. So you might want to check that one first as it's most likely to be compromised and most likely to divert gamespy traffic.

What you could do is copy both the "hosts. " and "hosts.msn" to your desktop or a personal folder and simply edit them with wordpad or similar to remove all lines at the bottom that are not "127.0.0.1 localhost" and then copy em back, overwriting the ones in the original folder.
If you don't feel secure about it you can add # in front of a line and remove it later when it causes problems.

Games looks hella challenging, I could also see it being repetitive if you don't have friends who play often at least during the day anyway. I guess at night the zombies are more active and more common and the game is more thrilling. What's the minimum pc requirements to play this game?

At 5/22/12 12:55 PM, II2none wrote:
Games looks hella challenging, I could also see it being repetitive if you don't have friends who play often at least during the day anyway. I guess at night the zombies are more active and more common and the game is more thrilling. What's the minimum pc requirements to play this game?

It's definitely challenging, and the new update implements a temperature bar where you can get cold from being in rain, water, and the cold. (Also the Winchester, my weapon of choice is louder now).

As for getting repetitive, that's may be a problem for some. The game can be a bit slow from time to time, especially traveling through woods and such. But it's contrasted by moments of extreme tension. I'm always on my toes when I play, even if I'm just running through the woods. You really have no idea what's going to happen, and that's what makes every session feel like a fresh experience. It's really easy for a situation to turn sour, even if you think you have the upper hand. (like when I accidentally shot Rig when we were playing together LOL)

At least while playing lonewolf, playing with others on some communication program completely changes the game for me, but still awesome. When direct communication is fixed, I feel this game will become even more interesting.

At 5/22/12 07:40 PM, Tramps wrote:
Seems to be working now. Not sure what did it. When I finally got in a server, I joined and it was pitch black. I could only see a red lit church in the distance - so I went to it. I wish I actually knew the controls of the game before I started playing. Either way I found a corpse and fiddled around with it, trying to check what he had on him. Somehow I had replaced my gun with flares and when a zombie attacked, all I did was throw flares at it. Couldn't figure out how to get my other weapon out. I then climbed the ladders to the top of the church and some guy killed me. :(

If you haven't gone through the ArmA Bootcamp tutorials, that might help. You can add me on steam and I can help ya out with other mechanics in Day Z if you want.

At 5/22/12 12:55 PM, II2none wrote:
Games looks hella challenging, I could also see it being repetitive if you don't have friends who play often at least during the day anyway. I guess at night the zombies are more active and more common and the game is more thrilling. What's the minimum pc requirements to play this game?

Dayz is 2 inconsistent to be called repetitive, however this inconsistency could be the very reason not to like it when games such as left4dead, re etc all have pretty consistent gameplay. There is also not a clear goal other than just surviving because it's in alpha. And the actual finished product will either be part of arma 3 or stand alone game , in order to make it easier to program and implement more survival things and zombie types and behaviors.

That said if I had to write all the memorable events almost movie like events here I would have to type 4 pages. Even a small task as getting fire wood from a super market can take a very weird twist if 2 gunmen run in and start firing at the 50 zombies they pulled. ( do you help them, just to get shot after? do you escape risking the hordes attention on you? do you kill em and escape while the zombies eat? ) No game offers you those choices unscripted, but the games inconsistency can also make your character die in a corner of a map as he got lost trying to find medicine to cure his pneumonia.

Played today for the first time in awhile and managed to find a fully working motorbike stashed in a shed. Unfortunately it was low on fuel. I drove it around for awhile and stop to get fuel when a zombie somehow spawned on top of me and knocked me. Sadly, I died of blood loss :c

Respawned without and weapons (new update) and found a hatchet. I managed to come across another survivor. He started firing at me, and I ran up smashed him with my hatchet and won the battle. I preceded to check his bag and he had a goldmine of equipment. Sadly, I died of blood loss :c

This is where I am so far. I have Six Updater and Arma 2 Free. I can't get past this screen. After I click ok it, it takes me to the second screen i put on the left.

Someone explain this to me in plain english please. I'm a complete fuckboy.

I'm not familiar with Six Updater, I just use the native server browser in Arma 2. So you do have Operation Arrowhead installed correct? You need that along with Arma 2 or Arma 2 Free. It's kind of tough to read your screenshot, but when you filter servers use "Day Z" and it'll filter out vanilla arma servers from the list.

At 6/21/12 12:52 AM, SineRider wrote:
I'm not familiar with Six Updater, I just use the native server browser in Arma 2. So you do have Operation Arrowhead installed correct? You need that along with Arma 2 or Arma 2 Free. It's kind of tough to read your screenshot, but when you filter servers use "Day Z" and it'll filter out vanilla arma servers from the list.

Oh I forgot to add, make sure you have ran both Arma 2 and Operation Arrowhead at least once as administrator before trying Day Z.

At 6/21/12 12:52 AM, SineRider wrote:
I'm not familiar with Six Updater, I just use the native server browser in Arma 2. So you do have Operation Arrowhead installed correct? You need that along with Arma 2 or Arma 2 Free. It's kind of tough to read your screenshot, but when you filter servers use "Day Z" and it'll filter out vanilla arma servers from the list.

Oh I forgot to add, make sure you have ran both Arma 2 and Operation Arrowhead at least once as administrator before trying Day Z.

Sorry I forgot to crop it. Here's a better version. And no I don't have Op Arrowhead. Is it free? And if it isn't, should I just get Combined Ops? I hear that getting CO is a better deal with more stuff.